Parents face Stamp Duty surcharge when helping first-time buyers

A change to the tax rules means parents could be heavily penalised for trying to help their children get on the property ladder.

At the start of this month a new 3% Stamp Duty surcharge came into effect for anyone buying a second home. Chancellor George Osborne brought in the additional levy to try and counteract the problem of buy-to-let investors snapping up all the starter homes, making it increasingly difficult for first-time buyers to get on the property ladder.

The problem is many such buyers rely on help from their parents in order to make the huge leap to the bottom rung of the property ladder. So the new tax rule could hit them too.

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Potential costs

The average salary is £27,000, but the average house now costs £284,000, according to the Office for National Statistics. 

That means a single person earning the average salary needs a £176,000 deposit to buy their first home, the average couple needs £68,000. 

In order to help with the affordability problem some parents give their children a helping hand with their deposit. Not everyone can afford to do that so another way parents help is by going in on a joint mortgage. 

But, if you already own your own home and you go in on a joint mortgage for your child’s home, the 3% levy would now apply to the whole purchase price. On the average home that would add almost £10,000 to the tax bill.

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What can you do about it?

At present there is very little you can do to avoid this problem, although it can be done. A handful of lenders have a solution.

“Some lenders such as Barclays and Metro already have a way to avoid this by allowing the parent to be joint on the mortgage but not on the property title,” says Peter Gettins, a product manager at mortgage broker London & Country Mortgages. 

This is known as getting a mortgage on a ‘sole proprietor, joint borrower’ basis, but very few lenders allow it.

This is a setback for first-time buyers already struggling to afford to buy a home. 

If you need your parent’s help on the mortgage the whole cost of your purchase will go up by thousands of pounds.